The Black Box

center. Chu was standing at the glass, looking toward the familiar spire of City Hall.
    “Chu, what’s going on?”
    Chu was startled by his sudden appearance.
    “Hey, Harry, sorry, I forgot something and . . . then I . . . uh . . .”
    “What, you forget to wipe your ass? I’ve been waiting. What happened with the DOJ?”
    “Yeah, no hits, Harry. Sorry.”
    “No hits? Did you run all ten possibles?”
    “I did, but no California transactions. The gun wasn’t sold in the state. Somebody brought it here and it was never registered.”
    Bosch put his hand on the railing and leaned his forehead on the glass. He could see City Hall reflected in the long wall of glass running on the perpendicular hallway. He was resigned that his luck couldn’t get any worse.
    “You got anybody at ATF?” he asked.
    “Not really,” Chu said. “Don’t you?”
    “Not really. Nobody who can expedite. I waited four months just for them to run the casing through their computer.”
    Bosch didn’t mention that he also had a checkered history of interactions with federal law enforcement agencies. Hecouldn’t count on anyone doing him a favor at the ATF or anywhere else. He knew if he went through standard procedure and filled out the forms, he might hear something back in six weeks minimum.
    He had one shot he could try. He stepped away from the glass wall and headed back to the squad room door.
    “Harry, where are you going?” Chu asked.
    “Back to work.”
    Chu started following him.
    “I wanted to talk to you about one of my cases. We have to do a pickup in Minnesota.”
    Bosch stopped at the door to the squad room. A “pickup” was what they called going to another state to confront and arrest a suspect in a cold case. Usually, the suspect had been connected to an old murder through DNA or fingerprint evidence. There was a map on the wall in the squad room with red pins marking all the pickup locations the squad had been to in the ten years since it was established. Dozens of pins were scattered across the map.
    “Which case?” Bosch asked.
    “Stilwell. I finally located him in Minneapolis. When can you go?”
    “Talk about a cold case. We’re going to freeze our butts off up there.”
    “I know. What do you think? I have to put in the travel request.”
    “I have to see where Jespersen takes me for the next few days. And then there’s the Professional Standards thing—I could be on suspension.”
    Chu nodded but Bosch could tell his partner had hopedfor more enthusiasm for picking up Stilwell. And something more definitive about when they would do it. Nobody in the squad liked waiting around once they had a suspect IDed and located.
    “Look, O’Toole probably isn’t going to approve any travel for me for a while. You might want to see if somebody else can go. Ask Trish the Dish. That way you’ll get your own room.”
    Department travel regulations required that detectives book only double-occupancy rooms so that the partners could share one room and save the department money. This was the downside of the travel because nobody wanted to share a bathroom, and invariably one partner or the other snored. Tim Marcia once had to tape-record his partner’s window-shaking snoring in order to persuade command staff to let him get his own room. But the easy exception was when partners were of the opposite sex. Trish Allmand was a highly sought-after partner in Open-Unsolved. Not only was she attractive—hence the nickname—and a skilled investigator, but work travel with her meant her partner got a room to himself.
    “But it’s our case, Harry,” Chu complained.
    “All right, then you’re going to have to wait. There’s nothing I can do.”
    Bosch went through the door and moved into their cubicle. He grabbed his phone and his notebook, which he had left on the desk. He thought about the call he was going to make and decided not to use either his cell or his desk phone.
    He looked around the vast Robbery-Homicide Division floor. Open-Unsolved was at the southern end of a room the length of a football field. Because of a departmental freeze on promotions and hiring, there were several uninhabited cubiclesin each of the individual squad areas. Bosch walked over to an empty desk in Homicide Special and sat down to use the landline. He got the number he needed out of his cell and punched it in. It was answered right away.
    “Tactical.”
    He thought he recognized the voice but he wasn’t sure after so